Update from Interpretation and Education

This past week we saw snow and temperatures in the 70s...spring is here at last! Stratford Hall is emerging from our winter season and gearing up for the spring. School trip season is not quite here, but our first school is scheduled be here at the end of the month. In the next couple weeks we will be reviewing program station content, checking on supplies, and cleaning the education spaces.

Public Events Manager Jon Bachman has been putting the finishing touches on our 2012 event calendar. Stratford Hall has already held four programs: Birding at Stratford: Left Out In the Cold, Robert E. Lee's Birthday, Reading Lee with Elizabeth Brown Pryor, and Reflections on Black History: Telling One Story. We have over twenty more programs on the schedule this year! The next program is Growing up Female in the 18th century. Many of our programs are also now free for Friends of Stratford members.

This winter also provided the opportunity to visit other museums for research. Previous blog posts highlighted our trip to Montpelier and Washington, DC. Four members of the staff also recently visited Tryon Palace in New Bern, NC. This two day trip included a visit to their historic site, tour of the North Carolina History Center, and meetings with their staff. The hands-on exhibits provided the opportunity for some fun and competition. The ship was sailed somewhat successfully, ingredients located in the kitchen without angering the cook (see kitchen above), turpentine produced, and quilt created.These trips are extremely valuable as we start to think about what we would like to do as we move forward with our plans.

Check back every Thursday to learn more about what is going on at Stratford Hall. We will be having posts about preservation, the collections, programs, events in the Dining Room, the Gift Shop, and so much more.

Field trips are not just for school children

Visiting other historic house museums is a very important part of staff training. Learning about what has (or has not) worked at other museums helps us develop our own skills and inspires new ideas.

This week the interpretive staff visited James Madison's Montpelier. Our visit stared with a guided tour of the Treasures of Montpelier exhibit with Carole, our fantastic guide, and a screening of the introductory movie. Carole then took us through the first and second floors of Montpelier.

After our tour we returned to the Visitor Center for lunch. We were joined by members of the interpretation and education departments for a question and answer session. For the guides, this was the highlight of the trip. The conversation ranged from the interpreter dress code to what to do when school buses arrive late.

Everyone was let loose for the final hour to explore whatever interested them. Some chose to visit the cemetery, while other walked to the Archaeology Lab. A few decided to check out the outbuildings and explore the gardens.

We all love Stratford, but sometimes it is nice to get out and be a visitor. We are very lucky because there are no shortage of amazing places to visit in Virginia!

Summer Projects and Interpretation

As you can see in the last five blog entries, we have been very busy at Stratford Hall this summer. Projects are underway in the Southwest Outbuilding, Slave Quarters, and Kitchen. Extensive research and investigations are in progress for the Historic Structure Report (HSR) and Cultural Landscape Inventory (CLI).

So, now what? Two areas greatly impacted by the projects are the interpretation and educational programs.

The interpreters at Stratford Hall guide visitors through the Great House seven times a day, seven days a week. This July, almost two thousand people toured the Great House. When you add in bus loads of school children and special events, our staff interacts with thousands of people each year.

I am the Director on Interpretation and Education. My job is to help take all this new information and ensure it is reflected in the interpretation (guided tours, school activities, and programs). Our interpreters are constantly learning more about Stratford Hall and updating their tours. While the investigations and projects are underway, the interpreters must also know how to talk about what the visitor is seeing (construction, restoration, furniture out of place, and open probes in the walls).

After the projects have been completed and the reports submitted for review to the staff here at Stratford Hall, all aspects of the interpretation will be reviewed. Just like the tour we provide today is very different from the tour a decade ago, the current tour will undoubtedly be updated to reflect the changes in scholarship.

We hope you continue to follow our progress and visit Stratford Hall to see for yourself all the work that has been done. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below or on the Facebook Fan Page.

Interpretation Department Happenings

With our shortened hours, visitors may wonder what we're doing during the winter months here at Stratford Hall. I wanted to report on some of the projects my staff and I are working on this January, February, and March so all of our readers could understand what goes on behind the scenes--while we may not be open to the public seven days a week right now, we're certainly keeping busy!

Our biggest project right now is revamping our school programs for elementary students. The first step in this process is going through our current programs and making some necessary changes to those. For one thing, we're making each station approximately an hour, instead of 25 minutes. This means putting a couple stations together--for example, beginning in the fall, when teachers want the Indentured program, they'll also get the slavery program, too (these were previously separate, and it was possible to choose one over the other). If we talk about indentured servitude without talking about slavery, students are only getting part of the picture of workers on this plantation when the Lees lived here. Thus, we're putting those programs together, adding additional hands-on activities, updating the information we tell students when they're here, and tightening up all of the programs' ties to the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs).

We're also updating the information that goes out to the schools--pre-visit information will become more detailed and post-visit information will ask how this trip affected the students' learning, so we can judge whether or not our programs are effective. This is going to be a long process, but we have high hopes that all the work will be done by the summer so we can use these newly updated programs for the fall 2010 school visits. To do this work, I've asked several of the interpretive staff to spend their time researching, brainstorming, writing, and doing these programs. I also have two interns from the University of Mary Washington working with me to create a new school program and update several of the older ones. We're all working together to make school visits here top-notch.

Along with this big project, the interpretation department is conducting a lot of training this winter. Aside from several in-service days where we discuss (and practice!) techniques to working with school students, the importance of a theme in tours, and the different types of interpretation, we are also visiting several local historic sites to see how those places do their tours and programs. Last week, we went to Montpelier to see the changes made there and how its staff works in an atmosphere that is always evolving (a very helpful learning experience), and soon we're going to drive the opposite direction to visit Shirley Plantation and Berkeley Plantation on the James River.

These are just a few of the projects going on in the interpretation department this winter--as you can see, we're keeping busy learning new things in order to make your visits to Stratford Hall better every time!

Earth Day and the Environment

Happy Earth Day! I thought we could use this opportunity to talk a bit about environmental education at Stratford Hall. Many people know us as a historic site, but we're always expanding our program offerings to include even more than history. With these changes, we'll address more of Virginia's Standards of Learning for school programs--not just history, but science and math, as well. While we have a start on this already, with a new fossils program and an architecture program we added last year, we're working harder to continually update and offer more options to teachers.

Something I'm very excited about is a new environmental school program I'm designing. As you probably know, Stratford Hall is located right on the Potomac River, which gives us ample opportunities to discuss environmental issues with school children and adults. Our new program will focus on a variety of topics: pollution in the Potomac River/Chesapeake Bay, recycling, conservation of water...and if it gets too big (which it may!), we'll split it into several different programs. I've gotten a lot of ideas for--and help with--this program from members of the Education team at Friends of the Rappahannock and the Three Rivers Environmental Educators (TREE).

This short blog posting all came about because today is Earth Day, and Earth Day should remind us all how important it is to recycle. Did you know that Cynthia Vanderlip, manager of the State of Hawaii’s Kure Atoll Wildlife Sanctuary, cut open the dead body of a fledgling albatross to find more than half a pound of plastic in its stomach? This picture shows all of those pieces--bottle caps, plastic lighters, etc. We shouldn't be thinking about taking care of the earth only on Earth Day, but this specific day does serve as a reminder to become more conscientious individuals. So next time you're on a beach, pick up that plastic bottle you see washing up to shore. And if you don't already, please start recycling. It's not a difficult thing to do, but will really make a difference in the end.